[1][2] Born in Wakefield, Illinois, Fuson attended Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, where after one year in 1914 he was certified as a teacher.
He accepted a postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University with E. P. Kohler and remained there to serve briefly as an instructor.
Fuson published 285 scientific articles and wrote or co-wrote five textbooks, including The Systematic Identification of Organic Compounds with R. L. Shriner and later including David Curtin and remains in print today with additional authors.
He enunciated the principle of vinylogy which is now taught in terms of resonance in valence bond theory, elucidated the mechanism of the conjugate addition of Grignard reagents to unsaturated carbonyls compounds, and discovered stable enols and enediols of sterically hindered molecules.
He was a member of the editorial boards of Organic Syntheses[5] and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.